Money Makes The World Go Round— And US Politicians Guaranteed Musk Has More Of It Than Anyone Else

Musk polls really badly so the White House is trying to have him pretend he’s not still an integral part of the Trump administration. But he is. He went with Trump to Qatar; he was part of the Oval Office ambush of the president of South Africa Wednesday. He’s in DC, not Austin, and worked behind the scenes to get Republicans to vote for Trump’s big ugly austerity budget. 

Politically, Musk is even kind of on the down low on Twitter! The Washington Post reported that in February, more than half of Musk’s posts and reposts on Twitter  were about DOGE or the federal government and politics. “About 13 percent of his February posts mentioned Trump by name, nearly double the proportion that named one of his companies. So far in May, the numbers have reversed. Now, under 20 percent of Musk’s posts are about DOGE or American politics, and more than half are about his other business ventures or technological issues more broadly. Just 3 percent of his posts name Trump, while more than 20 percent name one of his companies. It’s a remarkable shift for the billionaire businessman, who crash-landed in Washington with a mission to dramatically slash the size of the government by sending a band of mainly young tech workers into federal agencies to cut people and programs.”

All true… but all baloney at the same time. Musk is still very much running the show with Trump… despite the effortsto cover that up. Yesterday a trio of Politico writers reported his pledge to withdraw from political spending “is rippling across the nation’s political landscape. Some Republicans are worried that they might be losing their whale. Some Democrats fear they are losing their foil.”

Steve Bannon, who hates Musk, called his announcement that he’s done spending on politics, “Taking his toys and going home.” Don’t we wish! “Whether or not Musk actually stops contributing is still an open question. Asked about Musk’s decision to withdraw as a GOP donor, one Virginia Republican, granted anonymity to speak freely, said: “Eh, we’ll see.”

In Pennsylvania this year, Republicans and Democrats are gearing up for Supreme Court races, where three justices are up for retention in November. It could bring a repeat of the Wisconsin election: Democrats and Republicans started discussing whether Musk would play a role in the races, with the Philadelphia Inquirer reporting that one Democratic candidate, Justices Kevin Dougherty, warned that “Elon Musk has already invested $1 million,” though that couldn’t be verified yet through campaign reports.

Democrats especially don’t expect the tech billionaire to fully withdraw from political spending, and they expect him to funnel contributions legally through non-public, dark money means.

“I believe he will start moving his money in the background, through nonprofits,” said Pat Dennis, president of American Bridge, a major Democratic super PAC. “It’ll be a lot more of that now.”

Dennis also argued that Musk stepping away publicly may help Democrats narrow their focus back on congressional Republicans for cutting federal programs and that Musk had initially served as a “shield” for them when he was the de facto head of DOGE.

… Even some Republicans are unsure exactly what Musk’s announcement will mean for the future.

“I believe he means it right now. But every election is unique,” said Republican consultant Josh Novotney. “So he may be motivated to be active again in the future.”

This might be a perfect time to read Michael Scherer and Ashley Parker’s Atlantic essay The Decline And Fall Of Elon Musk, which is itself very contentious and has certainly infuriated Musk, who had, they wrote, come “to Washington all Cybertrucks and chain saws, ready to destroy the bureaucracy, fire do-nothing federal workers, and, he bragged, save taxpayers $2 trillion in the process. He was a tech support–T-shirt-wearing disruptor who promised to rewire how the government operates and to defeat the ‘woke mind virus,’ all under the auspices of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency. For weeks, he and his merry band of DOGE bros gleefully jumped from agency to agency, terrorizing bureaucrats, demanding access to sensitive data, and leaving snack wrappers on employees’ desks. But as Musk winds down his official time in Washington, he has found himself isolated within the upper reaches of the Trump administration, having failed to build necessary alliances and irritating many of the department and agency heads he was ostensibly there to help. His team failed to find anything close to the 13-figure savings he’d promised. Court challenges clipped other projects. Cabinet secretaries blocked DOGE cuts they said reduced crucial services. All the while, Musk’s net worth fell, his companies tanked in value, and he became an object of frequent gossip and ridicule. Four months after Musk’s swashbuckling arrival, he is effectively moving on, shifting his attention back to his jobs as the leader of Tesla, SpaceX, and Twitter, among his other companies. In a call last month with Wall Street analysts, Musk said he was planning to spend ‘a day or two per week’ focusing on DOGE issues— similar to how he manages each of his various companies. The next week, he seemed to suggest that he’d be slimming down his government portfolio even more, telling reporters that he expected to be in Washington ‘every other week.’ Yesterday, he told the Qatar Economic Forum in a video interview that he no longer sees a reason to spend money on politics, though that could change in the future. ‘I think I’ve done enough,’ he said.”

More than enough in the midst of most Americans, especially most normal Americans. Scherer and Parker claim Musk and Trump are still pals “but Musk’s decision to focus elsewhere has been greeted as a relief by many federal leaders, who have been busily undoing many of his cuts in their departments or making DOGE-style changes on their own terms. Cabinet leaders— who did not appreciate being treated like staff by the man boasting about feeding their fiefdom into a ‘wood chipper’— have widely ignored some of his efforts, such as his February demand that all federal employees send weekly emails to their supervisors laying out their accomplishments in bullet points… At the core of Musk’s challenges was his unfamiliarity with reforming an organization that, unlike his own companies, he does not fully control. Rather than taking the time to navigate and understand the quirks and nuances of the federal government— yes, an often lumbering and inefficient institution— Musk instead told his team to move fast: It would be better to backtrack later, if necessary, than to proceed with caution. (One administration official told us that Musk’s view was that if he hadn’t fired so many people that he needed to rehire some, it would mean that he hadn’t cut enough.) As he sought to solve spending and digital-infrastructure problems, he often created new issues for Trump, the president’s top advisers, and Capitol Hill allies.”

Most important, Trump has made clear that Musk did not have the freedom to reshape the government as he would one of his companies. Weeks after Musk appeared onstage with a chain saw to illustrate his plans for the federal government, Trump rebuked the approach on social media: “We say the ‘scalpel’ rather than the ‘hatchet,’” Trump wrote. Musk’s legal opponents have taken to celebrating his departure as a defeat for his larger ambitions. They point to public polling that shows that his public favorability has fallen markedly since the start of the year, as well as to the backlash he faced when he went to Wisconsin to campaign for a Republican-backed state-supreme-court candidate who ended up losing by double digits.

“We kicked him out of town,” Rushab Sanghvi, the general counsel for the American Federation of Government Employees, told us. “If he had stayed in the shadows and done his stuff, who knows how bad it would have been? But no one likes the guy.”

At a cabinet meeting at the end of April, possibly Musk’s last, the Tesla and SpaceX leader reduced himself to a punch line, wearing two caps— a red Gulf of America one perched atop his signature black DOGE hat. He joked about all the jobs that he was juggling. “As they say, I wear a lot of hats. And as you can see, it’s true. Even my hat has a hat,” he said, prompting genuine laughter.

The uprising against Musk— in hindsight, the abrupt beginning of the slow end— had begun in the same room a month earlier, at an impromptu meeting. Cabinet secretaries, who had not yet been confirmed for office when Musk began his work, had been expressing frustration to Trump and to White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, among others, about Musk’s meddling. Musk, meanwhile, had been griping about what he viewed as the slow pace of hiring.

In fact, the Trump administration had been staffing up remarkably quickly by federal standards for a new administration. But, as one White House adviser explained to us, “if you’re Elon, in the business of firing people, it’s easy to see hiring through a different lens.”

Sick of presiding over the competing complaints, Trump finally declared: Bring them all in here, and we’ll have at it. The next day, the Cabinet secretaries did just that. Details of the meeting— including Musk’s heated back-and-forth with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, as well as with Doug Collins, the secretary of veterans affairs, and Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary— almost immediately leaked into new reports. Musk upbraided Rubio during the meeting for not sufficiently reducing his staff, and Rubio— already upset that Musk had essentially dissolved USAID, one of the agencies under his purview— vigorously fought back. (“That was one of the turning points for Trump and Marco, where Trump realized Marco had a little spine,” one Trump ally told us.)

Several people told us that though Musk understood that he was walking into an ambush, he was unaware of the extent of the coming pile-on. After the “whining about DOGE” and Musk generally “taking it,” someone familiar with the meeting told us, Musk defended his efforts. At one point, he declared that his real problem was not with firing people or reducing the size of government but with quickly hiring new, better people. (Early on, Musk had been irritated that he couldn’t instantaneously hire DOGE engineers, who found themselves subjected to the same MAGA loyalty tests as everyone else, and he was unable to muscle onto the government payroll a Turkish-born venture capitalist with a green card, because U.S. law generally prohibits noncitizens from working for the federal government.)

… Musk’s influence on the early months of the Trump administration is, of course, undeniable. He regularly amplified administration messaging—and occasionally undercut it—on Twitter. And he focused attention on an issue that many voters agree should be a priority, at least in theory: eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse in Washington, and making the government more efficient and technologically nimble. He also cut large swaths of the federal workforce, albeit in such a “haphazard” way, as one adviser put it to us, that the actual results have proved mixed. Some talented and experienced career bureaucrats— the sorts of officials Trump and Musk ostensibly wanted to retain— decamped to the private sector or took early retirement, and the general chaos led to some fired employees being hired back. At the Federal Aviation Administration, Musk’s interference and cuts have caused mayhem, especially among already overtaxed air-traffic controllers. Musk also made himself the public face of the Trump administration’s decision to shut down USAID, a decision that the Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates described as “the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children.” (Musk, who’d initially earned the fraught designation of “co-president” and seemed destined for a rocket-fuel-caliber blowup with the actual president, also lasted much longer in government than many had surmised he would— and is exiting with something akin to grace, at least by Trumpian standards.)

Ayushi Roy, a former technologist at the General Services Administration who now teaches digital government at Harvard Kennedy School, told us that Musk has achieved at least some of his goals: cutting the federal workforce and traumatizing the employees who remain. But, she said, he has largely failed to build anything that’s made government more efficient.

“I am waiting for them to actually deliver something. Right now they have just been deleting things. They haven’t added any value,” she told us. “If it is just us hatcheting things instead of improving or even replacing them, the goal, to me, is not actually about improving efficiency.”

Calkins, the software CEO, cautioned us to not undersell what Musk has done. Given the “resolute structure” of government bureaucracy, he said, it’s impressive that Musk even “got a few big nicks.”

… Musk also found himself clashing with other Trump advisers on policy questions that could take a bite out of his personal fortune. The billionaire argued against the administration’s tariff bonanza— at one point, he urged “a zero-tariff situation” between the United States and Europe— and publicly attacked Trump’s top trade adviser, Peter Navarro, calling him “dumber than a sack of bricks.” In late March, according to a New York Times report, Musk was preparing to receive a secret briefing from the Pentagon on the country’s planning for a potential war with China. After the Times story published, Trump posted on social media that Musk’s trip to the Pentagon would not include any China briefing. But the report prompted a public outcry, including over Musk’s many potential conflicts of interest.

“You could feel it, everything changed, the fever had been broken,” the longtime Trump ally and Musk foe Steve Bannon told us in a text message about the Pentagon uproar. In Bannon’s view, government officials had opted to leak to the Times rather than directly confront Musk or bring their concerns to the president—a troubling sign, he told us, of Musk’s outsize power.

Now Trump-administration officials wonder just what will happen to DOGE once Musk pivots elsewhere. In some cases, DOGE employees have already become more formally enmeshed in the administration, taking on official roles within government agencies. A top Musk aide is now the Interior Department’s assistant secretary of policy management and budget, and a DOGE point person to the Department of Energy is now chief of staff. One administration official told us that Musk’s much-vaunted— and initially chaotic— reductions in the federal workforce are now coming to fruition across the government, but in a more organized fashion.

Musk’s “special government employee” status always meant that he was going to depart the government after 130 days. But for a time, there was West Wing chatter about stretching the limit of a “working day” to allow him to extend his time in the administration. Now even Musk has stopped stoking those expectations. “The mission of DOGE— to cut waste, fraud, and abuse— will surely continue,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told us in an email. “DOGE employees who onboarded at their respective agencies will continue to work with President Trump’s cabinet to make our government more efficient.”

Speaking to a group of reporters earlier this month, Musk implied that DOGE is self-sustaining and could carry on without him. “DOGE is a way of life,” he told them, “like Buddhism.” But when asked how, exactly, DOGE could continue, he was coy. “Is Buddha needed for Buddhism?” he asked.

This morning, the AP reported that Señor Trumpanzyy “has amassed a war chest of at least $600 million in political donations heading into the midterm elections, according to three people familiar with the matter. It’s an unprecedented sum in modern politics, particularly for a lame-duck president who is barred by the U.S. Constitution  from running again. Trump is keeping an aggressive fundraising schedule with the ultimate goal of raising $1 billion or more to back his agenda and hold the House and Senate next November, according to the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity to share internal details of the fundraising efforts. The preoccupation with fundraising might seem highly unusual for a president who was notably averse to dialing for dollars when he first ran. But according to people familiar with his thinking, it makes perfect sense: By amassing money, Trump amasses power.” Does this NY Times article indicate that Musk is backing away from his involvement with buying political influence? Asking for a friend.